How I made some Pokémon Business Cards

As I’m in the industry now I figured I needed some business cards and as it seems the 90s never left us and Japanese monsters are hip again, I decided to make them Pokémon themed.

I think they turned out pretty well, and here I’m just going to give some pointers on how I did them.

If you want to make a Pokémon business card you first need some tools. I used the open source Gimp to preprocess the images that would make up the card and Inkscape to compose the final card, but any decent graphics program should do. Using these tools it was pretty easy to put the card together, the trickier part was to get all the graphics for the card.

First I needed backgrounds and symbols from typical Pokémon cards, fortunately there is a whole community dedicated to making “fake” Pokémon cards and I found all the assets I needed over at PokemonCardResources. If you’re going to make a card for printing, make sure to get high resolution assets. I went with the classic Japanese lightning cards but there are plenty of other layouts to choose from. Make sure to get the backside and some energy symbols too. It is also useful to find a couple of real Pokémon cards on Google image search that you can base your card on. Mine was loosely based on this Pikachu card:

Then you are going to need yourself drawn as a Pokémon. If you can do this yourself you are truly very talented, if you are like me you will need help. I found help on fiverr, a marketplace for “Creative Services” where, for a price around $5 to $20 you can get someone to make you a logo or, say, turn you into a Pokémon. The guy that Pikachued me for $10 was Iusagi, a super talented and super friendly guy. I also found Benjdesigns who specializes in writing your name in Pokélogostyle, so I decided to replace the logo on the backside of the card too. One week after ordering I got two awesome images back! 🙂

Now you’ll have to spend some time putting all of this together, and here I can’t give any other advice than to base your business card closely on an actual Pokémon card. I formatted and prepared the image assets in Gimp and then imported them into Inkscape where I made the final card. I didn’t have any of the fonts used on the original Pokémon cards, so I used the free Lato font which is a close enough match. As actual Pokémon cards includes the abilities of each Pokémon the card ended up as a mini-resume with R and stats based skills (but also including my weight, height and Pokémon type…). In the end you should find yourself with two high resolution images, one for the front and one for the back

The final step is to actually print the cards. I ended up ordering 63 x 88mm Game Cards from makeplayingcards.com which are roughly the size of Pokémon cards. On arrival I was happy to find that both the cards and the printing was of a quality similar real Pokémon Card.

If you want to trade cards, or just have a chat, you can catch me in the wild around the Copenhagen/Malmö area, perhaps at an upcoming CopenhagenR meetup…